How Apple Inspired the Stormtroopers of Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Michael Kaplan, the costume designer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, began his career in the mid-1970s working for Bob Mackie, Hollywood’s glitziest designer, on The Sonny and Cher Show. (His initial task: “metallicizing” a pair of Cher’s shoes to match one of Mackie’s gowns.) Kaplan made the leap to film with Ridley Scott’s visionary Blade Runner (1982). He has since designed costumes for Flashdance, Se7en, Fight Club, Armageddon, I Am Legend, and J.J. Abrams’s two rebooted Star Trek movies.

Kaplan and I recently spoke about his work for Abrams on The Force Awakens, including the influences of both Apple and the Third Reich on the fashions of the resurgent Empire, along with the question of just how crazy or not he could get with Princess Leia’s and Han Solo’s outfits.

Read Vanity Fair’s June 2015 cover story on The Force Awakens and see Annie Leibovitz’s exclusive cast photos.

Bruce Handy: It’s interesting that the costume designer for Blade Runner is now working on a Star Wars movie, because those are the two movies, along with The Road Warrior, that really defined the lived-in, retro-future look that has been such a staple in science fiction for the last 40 years. Did you draw much on your Blade Runner experience for The Force Awakens?

Michael Kaplan: I learned a lot on Blade Runner, just my love of grit and texture and things being overly aged. The reason I got the job on Blade Runner was they were meeting with a lot of people, and a lot of people, when they heard it was futuristic, were kind of bringing in, like, Mylar space-suit sketches and things like that, and I think I was the only one who read the script and felt that it should have an old Sam Spade, old gumshoe kind of feeling. When I said that, it kind of hit a note and I got the job.

I learned from Ridley how great it is to re-use things and make new things out of things that already exist in a way, where you’re kind of not even recognizing the object that you started with. I like digging around in thrift shops and I don’t know if that’s a signature but it’s something that I’ve done a lot in my work. Or maybe it’s just the films that I’ve been on that have required that.

How did that play out on The Force Awakens?
We re-used many things, like taking old military gas masks and tubes and hoses and kind of applying them, which we did on Blade Runner, which I’ve always liked to do when I can.

Did you actually re-use any old Star Wars costumes? Are there like racks and racks of old stormtrooper uniforms in some warehouse up at Lucas Ranch?
We didn’t use anything, but I went up to George Lucas’s archives—huge building—and just spent a day going through sketches and looking just to get the tone of the movie, you know, in my guts and veins so that when I went to London I felt equipped and inspired, which I certainly did.

But the old stormtroopers uniforms would not be usable. Audiences of today have become so sophisticated that a lot of things you could get away with in the past, you can’t anymore. So the new uniforms are much heavier. Also, the action in the film required them to not be “VacuFormed” [like the old uniforms] as those all broke and cracked. These new ones are much more heavy-duty, but they are redesigned, too, they’re not the same stormtroopers.

How did you tweak them?
Everything was a conversation with J.J., of course. He wanted to hold on to the uniqueness and not get too far away from the stormtroopers, keep that iconic look, but still have 30 years of difference. I mean, it would be a little odd to have the same stormtroopers this much later when Leia and Han are so much older.

Well, right. The U.S. military isn’t wearing the same things they were wearing in the 70s, either.
Fashion changes and requirements change.

The new stormtroopers featured in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures

Did you invent some kind of fashion back-story in your head to explain how the look of this galaxy might have evolved?
Maybe subconsciously, but with the stormtroopers it was more of a simplification, almost like, “What would Apple do?” J.J. wanted them to look like stormtroopers at a glance but also be different enough to kind of wow people and get them excited about the new design.

What other old looks did you update?
I remembered when I saw the original movie I was a little bit confused by the warring factions, because the uniform colors kind of overlapped—both [the rebels and the Empire] had some khakis and olive, and I kind of thought, Now I’m in a position to do something about this. So I made two very, very clean-cut palettes. The Empire is in very cold blacks and grays and metallics and teal blues. The Rebels are in khakis and olives and some oranges—warmer colors. So there are very clear separations and you know who you’re looking at when you see them. Also, the lines of the costumes. The Rebels are kind of wools and natural fibers, cottons, and the Empire is very hard-lined, almost like Thierry Mugler. Very kind of edgy. The haircuts are these three-quarter parts, which were big in the 1930s, so that’s kind of recalling something from the past.

From what I’ve seen, it’s a bit of a classic Nazi look.
Slicked back and very hard-lined, yeah. Well the Nazi thing was always there with the Empire.

Tell me about designing for Leia and Han and Luke. They’re such iconic characters and they had such iconic looks. Do you reference what we’ve seen in the past, or not at all?
A lot of it had to do with what was right for the story and the action, but a lot of it was also, you know, people have a way of dressing. I wouldn’t really be doing my job if I thought, Hey, let’s redesign this character totally and put them in colors they’ve never worn. It just wouldn’t make any sense. But you also want new, interesting things to look at. You want enough change to be there.

What did you think of the original Star Wars when it was first released?
I knew that it was this huge thing. It wasn’t a turning point in my life as it was for so many people. I loved the movie, but I didn’t go to see it again the next day. And if you had asked me, I never, ever would have thought that I would be a person considered to design [a sequel]. I saw my career as going in a totally different way than it’s gone. I thought I would be doing, you know, big costume period movies, but I’ve been doing so many kind of machismo movies, you know, Star Trek and Fight Club and Se7en and Blade Runner. It’s kind of funny that people see my work as going in that direction. I always thought I’d be doing a lot of pretty dresses.

First Order officer Captain Phasma (Gwendoline Christie) surveys the rubble following an attack.

Photo: Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

A small galaxy’s worth of tracking dots affixed to Lupita Nyong’o’s face allowed artists at Industrial Light & Magic to transform her into the C.G.I. character Maz Kanata.

Photo: Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

Next-generation bad guy Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) commands snowtroopers loyal to the evil First Order on the frozen plains of their secret base.

Photo: Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

Actress Daisy Ridley for a scene in which her character, the young heroine Rey, pilots her speeder through a bustling marketplace on the planet Jakku.

Photo: Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

Members of the brain trust behind The Force Awakens: composer John Williams, producer and Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, co-writer Lawrence Kasdan, and director and co-writer Abrams, photographed at Bad Robot, Abrams’s production company, in Santa Monica.

Photo: Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

Galactic travelers, smugglers, and other assorted riffraff fill the main hall of pirate Maz Kanata’s castle.

First Order officer Captain Phasma (Gwendoline Christie) surveys the rubble following an attack.

Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

A small galaxy’s worth of tracking dots affixed to Lupita Nyong’o’s face allowed artists at Industrial Light & Magic to transform her into the C.G.I. character Maz Kanata.

Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

Next-generation bad guy Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) commands snowtroopers loyal to the evil First Order on the frozen plains of their secret base.

Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

Actress Daisy Ridley for a scene in which her character, the young heroine Rey, pilots her speeder through a bustling marketplace on the planet Jakku.

Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

Members of the brain trust behind The Force Awakens: composer John Williams, producer and Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, co-writer Lawrence Kasdan, and director and co-writer Abrams, photographed at Bad Robot, Abrams’s production company, in Santa Monica.